Europe to move towards more flexible standardisation

The Puzzle of EU Standards
The Puzzle of EU Standards

The EU takes steps to regulate  standardisation processes and their role in public procurement.

“More Standards for Europe and faster: this is the main objective of a series of measures that the European Commission proposed on 1 June 2011. Standards are sets of voluntary technical and quality criteria for products, services and production processes. Nobody is obliged to use or apply them but they help businesses in working together which ultimately saves money for the consumer.” See press release here.

According to Walter van Holst:

“The gist of it is:
– It acknowledges that traditional standardisation bodies are lacking
in speed, accountability and transparancy;
– It acknowledges the importance of standards;
– It acknowledges that traditional standardisation bodies are hardly
relevant in ICT;

Among other things it includes a proposal to:

– Recognise certain standards as set by ‘consortia’ (meaning W3C, IETF
etc.) as of equal importance as those set by traditional standardisation
bodies.
– Introduce a process at the European level for such recognition,
including criteria such as FRAND licensing of relevant patents;

This is of great importance. A rule in European tendering procedures
for public procurement is the ‘objectivity principle’, which means that
if a European technical standard (as formulated by a traditional
standardisation body) is relevant to award a tender, it must be used as
a criterium. This rule is mostly ignored in ICT-tendering procedures,
partly because ISO c.s. are nowhere near as relevant in the ICT context
as they are in other industries.

As it is, this may be a great opportunity for proponents of FLOSS. For
example, if ODF, HTML 5, CalDav, CardDav, IMAP and LDAP would be
proposed and accepted, this might severely impact the stranglehold of
Microsoft on the market. ”

  1. Josef Assad avatar
    Josef Assad

    A few remarks.

    FRAND is iffy and potentially quite problematic. At the national and regional levels, FRAND is invariably taken to mean “reasonable to quite big companies”. Quite apart from the fact that the EU public tender framework structurally and institutionally excludes smaller shops from the vast majority of ICT-related public tenders, this conclusively excludes the indie developer from accessing the necessary rights to implement these standards. No amount of haggling over the specifics of FRAND is good enough; it needs to go or the framework is useless. If i’m wrong about FRAND, a blog post from you on the nuances would be useful to many people I think!

    Another problem is what precisely falls under FRAND. This becomes important when you consider what I see as the two prerequisites for a third party to implement a standard or protocol: the right to do so, and the technical background, documentation, and all that follows. The standard itself might be open and accessible, but reference implementations and/or other vital technical prerequisites might not. Example: the Apache Foundation’s story with the Java Compatibility Kit. So it isn’t enough that the standard is open, whatever that ends up meaning.

    Then there’s the issue that this whole framework only addresses domains/industries where will to standardise already exists. Vast swathes of European industry do not exhibit this characteristic for whatever reason (from my observations, one reason has been “heavy” fields with few extremely big vendors; see railways). So these industries are exempt from the benefits of standardisation simply because the market forces have not imposed upon the vendors a will to standardise. As I understand it, another example is in energy-related industries such as smart meters (happy to stand corrected on this one; only passing experience here). Apart from the fact that industries where standards do exist are flouting them in Tenders, there’s a lot of industries where the customer can’t reasonably require much in terms of openness or standardised technology due to market structural characteristics. So, perhaps a redefinition of EU market structural supervision mandate is needed. What I mean to say is, a lot of this standardisation work being done only addresses the subset of the European market where market forces already favor the customer.

    I am not sure it’s useful to single Microsoft out. What share of the European wallet do they account for vis a vis collective EU public expenditure, including industries not “threatened by the commodifying effects of standardisation”? (just using vendor-speak for my own amusement there)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *